Rhetoric in a nutshell
Anyone can come across as confident, says quick-wittedness coach Matthias Pöhm. He demonstrated to exam experts at Swiss Marketing that it takes a few tricks—and practice.
Swiss Marketing is the professional and trade association for marketing experts. Among other things, it organizes the professional and advanced professional examinations in marketing and sales. The examination experts are specialists with an awareness of quality and high educational standards - including their own. This is ensured by the annual further training of experts for the professional examination for marketing specialists in the presentation and communication techniques section of the examination. The event was hosted and organized by Peter Gilli, AGON Marketing Service, Zofingen.
He stood on the table, true to the day's motto "Are you still presenting or are you already fascinating?", and left no doubt as to who was claiming the attention: Matthias Pöhm, the No. 1 repartee coach (Business Inside) and founder of the Anti-Power-Point-Party. He knows what is important when speaking in front of an audience and wants to convey this clearly to the examination experts on this day. He will begin by explaining his own career path, which began with an anxiety attack during his first public speech and led him to become a seasoned public speaking expert.
Tips and tricks
It soon becomes clear that anyone can learn to be confident. A few tricks and - above all - practice are helpful. The so-called pre-declaration was practiced on site in small groups. This is a kind of "Gluschtigmacherli ", which triggers expectations and creates tension in order to focus the listener's attention on the actual message. In practice, it goes like this: "Dear participants, I'm going to tell you something that will change your life from the ground up." This is followed by at least a 3-second pause, which could be described as "fishing for attention", and then the actual message: "Even the worst speakers will soon be among the elite with a public speaking training course."
Another expert tip is: only if the content is delivered in an appealing form will the message reach the recipients in the long term. And this works quite well even with banal content. Concrete instructions for action are also very important. Announcing to the workforce that you need to be even closer to the customer in future does not change any behavior because you have not specified what exactly customer proximity means: Should you hug customers or read their wishes from their eyes? (In this case, a fortune-telling seminar would probably be more appropriate.) A concrete instruction would be, for example, to greet customers with an open handshake when they enter the store, to ask them for their name and what they want. Employees can also implement such concretely formulated instructions.
People are more convincing than technical aids. Power Point presentations are a red rag for the founder of the Anti-Power Point Party.
Power Pöhm instead of Power Point
They may be able to present content with sophisticated technical tricks, but they cannot trigger emotions. "It's not the content that determines the effect, but the feeling triggered when the content is presented," emphasizes Pöhm. The less distracting the speaker is, the greater the impact of the speech. If you show a photo, for example, you should describe the image in words beforehand to create anticipation, excitement and curiosity. Prepared in this way, every photo has a much stronger emotional impact.
What does all this have to do with examination experts?
The examination experts are professionals whose everyday work includes presentations. They are all professionals in this discipline. Nevertheless, the topic is refreshed before each exam. "It is important that the experts - just like the candidates - prepare intensively for this federal professional examination, which is carried out by Swiss Marketing under the supervision of the Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology (OPET)," explains Peter Gilli, Head of the Department. "Today, the experts were once again able to get up to speed professionally, update themselves on the latest developments and gain important insights that will be incorporated directly into the examination paper. That's how it should be."
